What's kind of amusing about this article is that Feynman diagrams are themselves vastly faster graphical ways for computing terms in quantum electrodynamics. They condensed pages of tedious integrals to a couple of scribbles. Julian Schwinger, one of the other winners of the Nobel prize for QED once commented "Like the silicon chips of more recent years, the Feynman diagram was bringing computation to the masses."

Our son was home from grad school this weekend, and this discovery was the first thing he told us about. He said the whole department was excitedly plugging these new equations into their research projects.

His prof's research involves modeling a Helium-4 nucleus as a cloud of interacting quarks, rather than as two protons and two neutrons. So at three quarks per particle, it's a 12-body physics problem. I can see why they'd be excited by anything that promised to simplify the math!